a connecticut yankee in queen charlotte's court

It's been a while since my last entry but I think now is as good a time as ever to try to get back into doing a kind of creative journaling!

A lot has happened since I last posted. We got engaged; we bought a house and moved; I quit my job. Many things are still hard with the pandemic and all, but I'm beginning to feel better. Some of my creative energy has come back, and I started writing again this week for the first time in over a year.

Farewell 2021!

2021 was so hard, y'all. Sure, the world fell to shit in 2020, but 2021 was the year where all I could was hold my breath and keep going. In August 2020, I moved from Connecticut to Charlotte to be with my now-fiancee. While that relationship is strong, that move was real tough on me, more so than I'd expected. I've lived in three different countries before, after all, so why should it be hard to move a few states over? But this time, moving sucked. Moving into her life and her space was way harder than asserting my own life in a new place, especially as my own life had been so rudely disrupted by the pandemic. I finished my PhD remotely at the end of 2020, and had no fanfare. I also had no opportunities to make my own friends with the pandemic, and meanwhile, my own friends were now a thousand miles away and I didn't know when I would ever get to see them next.

I also discovered that weather was important to me in a way I had never realized before. Seasons ground me. I suppose I had always said that my favorite season was the change of seasons, but I never understood just how true that was before. Sure, Charlotte folks will tell you they have seasons, but it's a lie. This past week had an average temperature of 72. In January. Bullshit, I tell you, bullshit!

But . . . things are slowly looking up. I'm starting to feel a little more settled here. Moving to the house was great. I love our house. My fiancee and I have started to discuss the possibility of moving back up to New England one day. I found a tumblr friend who lives 20 minutes away from me and we'll go hiking this weekend. There's a gaymer group and a board game group that I will start to go to, once Omicron burns itself out. I'm starting to feel creative again, and it's good. 

Looking forward to 2022:

I have three main "resolutions" for 2022:

1. Make exercise part of my routine again.
2. Prioritize creativity. 
3. Make at least one good local friend.

I've had a strong start so far. I've been taking long walks around lunch time, and it should get cold this week, so I'm looking forward to getting to feel the nip of winter (well, it feels more fall, but close enough) on my face. I've been way more creative the last few weeks than the whole year combined. Dragon Age has re-captured my attention, and I've done some drawings and picked up an old WIP again! I watched the Arcane a few weeks ago, and I was inspired by fanvid ideas (not that I'm actually going to make it, but still).

I've also found a lot of creativity in an unexpected source: cooking! In 2021, there was a lot of stress around cooking. While I was in grad school, I'd gotten really good at weekly meal prep. But when I moved in with my fiancee, she didn't like a lot of my recipes. There was a lot of frustration at first about finding a good rotation of meals we would both enjoy, but we've finally found a balance. In the past few weeks I've made Sengalese peanut stew, a salmon chowder, a hearty vegetarian stew (yeah I was on a soup kick), fresh bread, yaki onigiri, stuffed butternut squash pasta, Japanese curry udon (and made the curry powder from scratch!), and a bunch of others. And while I used to feel frustrated by daily cooking in the past, I'm starting to find it a relaxing, creative time. It's really been nice. Tonight's dish is going to be a winter pasta with butternut squash and kale. Maybe I'll start posting here about how my culinary adventures go!

So here's to getting my energy back and learning to be as badass in Charlotte as I ever was in Connecticut and Montreal!